2010-11-29

Not sure if anything went smoothly tonight, first I went almost off-the-road then got nearly stuck on the hill to the imaging site. When there, the scope shelter was buried in a foot of snow and the locks were frozen. Finally I got almost everything assembled, simply to realize that the power-cord from the transformer to 12V distribution block was left home. Luckily I found one in the nearly warm cabin, so it was time to fire up the gear. Velcro glues peeled off the mount in the -20 temperatures, and I had to fetch a rope to tie the distribution block to the mount. Quite soon it was obvious that nothing worked perfectly, so park the scope, dis- and reconnect all wires, restart applications and everything seems to work nicely for a change. Except, when focusing I noticed that the shutter isn't fully open on all of the frames. Tried a few longer exposures and the same thing continued, the upper half was more likely to go all the way off-sensor, lower half got stuck one third the way down. In six hours I managed to get 30 minutes of botched luminosity instead of targeted 3+ hours of LRGB data.

2010-11-17

My simplistic SW-project for automating the tedious task to center on a target is slowly bearing fruit. At last I have a GUI written that can be used to test whether my library works correctly or not.

The current capabilities of the GUI are capturing an image (at least screenshot, ASCOM and from file works), solving it with astrometry.net -solver, syncing and reslewing an ASCOM compatible telescope, and calculating the distance from assumed target and solved image center.

I'm still not decided on the name, currently the library is AstroMate and the preliminary name of the GUI is AstroTortilla. Hopefully I end up with a single name, although the second utility based on the same library is an alignment helper (currently unstarted and unnamed) based on automatic imaging and solving when moving on the RA axis.

2010-11-14

Yestarday was the end-of-season party at the golf club, featuring a fairly funny comedian trickster who had a couple of new tricks up his sleeve, but mostly his definitely well practiced quips on people and events around made an impression. This year I didn't succeed on any of the competitions, so hopefully I get to practice a bit during the winter and early spring in order to improve my game come next summer. This season was definitely "ruined" by the short game. On the Hill course I reached the green from tee five times, and on 15th three times, didn't score a single eagle. What's even worse is that out of those eight chances for an eagle I made only two birdies. Anyone willing to go practice with me, just to make sure that practicing would happen?

2010-11-10

I've relocated my old blog(s) here from Wordpress and MovableType, and it was almost a straight forward conversion using the google-blog-converters-appengine web-services. Only some minor issues like character encoding didn't auto-convert to UTF-8 so that had to be done by hand, and one of the blog-posts had an eight-dash line which in MovableType export file marks the end of a blog-entry. This caused the XML to be malformed and the entry importing froze without indication of error.

All in all this should now be my real blog, some old entries are likely broken, especially the ones trying to show images in pop-up windows.

LRGB image of the often neglected companion of M42 The Great Orion Nebula. The Running Man nebula is a combination of an open cluster and reflection, emission and dark nebulae. I wanted to show the eerie faint red glow of the ionized hydrogen behind the bright reflective parts as well as the immense depths of darkness available in the vast nebulous region.

The battle against reflections continues. I've been suffering from horrendous internal reflections, and after matting most of the inner surfaces I still have a serious problem with something reflecting to the edges, the current suspect is the inner surfaces of the filter rings. Time to go looking for a very dark matte black with an extremely fine pigment.